The present invention relates to a cooking appliance and method particularly useful for frying or steaming food. The inventions is especially useful as a frying appliance for frying various types of food articles, such as potatoes, pieces of chicken, and the like, and is therefore described below with respect to such an application; but as will also be described below, the appliance and method could also be used for other applications including steaming food, cooking rice, and popping corn.
Many types of frying appliances have been developed and are described in the literature, for example in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,873,920, 4,901,633, 5,010,805, 5,146,841, 5,165,329, 5,379,684, 5,524,527, 5,543,166, 5,584,234, and 5,611,265. In most of these appliances, the food articles are completely immersed in hot oil during the frying process thereby causing them to become soaked in the oil. This detracts from the taste and is also generally considered unhealthy. Moreover, such appliances require large quantities of frying oil, long frying times, and large quantities of energy for heating the frying oil. While the foregoing drawbacks have been previously recognized, e.g., see the above-cited U.S. Pat. No. 5,543,166, the techniques to overcome these drawbacks have generally involved large, complicated constructions which are expensive to produce, bulky to ship and store, and/or inconvenient to use.